[Marble-devel] Improve OSX build process: build a marble framework

[Kathrin Geilmann]

Hello,

first of all: congratulations to everybody who works and worked on 
marble. It's a very nice piece of software.

I wanted to use the marblewidget in a project of my own and 
encountered a few problems during build. I'm working on OSX (10.6.8) 
and building QTONLY (Qt 4.7) Versions of Marble. So everything may 
be valid on other configurations also, but I didn't check.

The problem triggering all my activity was, the one described 
in Bug 299029:
Building the app.bundle works fine, but all plugins are build in
the wrong format (.so instead of .dylib), so they cannot be loaded.  

When I tried to fix this bug, I came accross a number of other problems all
related to the build process, or more precise to the targets created by the 
build. As far as I figured out, all of them could be solved quite 
easily if the marble library is not just build as a shared library but 
bundled as a framework. 

So I have two proposals to make and I need your opinion about it. 
			
Proposal:	Build universal 32/64bit binaries by default
Reason:		- Qt is build that way and this would prevent 
			problems when loading plugins on 64bit machines 
			- This is mainly a prerequisit for the second
			proposal, otherwise the plugins may fail there.
Status:		- I have done it (patch attached).
			It compiles fine and I did not encounter any problems
			with it during tests.   


Proposal: 	Build the library Marble as a Framework-Bundle.
			The Framework should contain the library, the plugins, headers and the data files.
Reason:		- Frameworks are the usual way to distribute shared 
			libraries on OSX. Providing a framework would allow 
			developers to include the library  very easily in 
			their own programs. 
			- A Framework can be installed at the usual 
			paths (/Library/Frameworks), (~/Library/Frameworks) 
			and is available for all programs then, especially 
			the qt designer plugins could be linked to them with ease
			- The users know about frameworks (at least advanced users)
			and they can easily update and/or remove them.
			- Frameworks can be included into Application Bundles,
			and shipped with the App. The procedure to do
			this is the same for all frameworks and every Mac Programmer 
			should already know it.		 
Work to do:	- Change Build Files to build the Framework
			- Change creation of App-Bundle: link against the Framework
			instead against the libraries
			- Fix the magick in MarbleDirs, in order to find the plugins
			and the data file inside the framework bundle. 
			- Change the Scripts that create the binary releases, in order
			to include not only the Qt Frameworks but also the Marble Framework
Status:		- I partly implemented this using dirty hacks (patching 
			automatically generated files by hand, calling manually 
			calling shell scripts at the right point during 
			the build process,...). I managed to get a 
			Framework put together and I was able to use it to get the designer
			plugins working, as well as linking my own application against it.
			- I didn't investigate any other plugins, nor did I try to get the
			data and plugin path right


Kind regards, 

	Kathrin Geilmann			
			

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